UCLA PROGRAM IN EXPERIMENTAL CRITICAL THEORY

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER. Abstract: The idea of deconstruction as formulated by Heidegger (before Derrida and differently from him) implies to question the provenance of our concepts in order to bring out ways of relating to phenomena that have been concealed by a received and crystallized conceptuality. I would like to illustrate this idea from a significant example: the notion of body. It seems obvious to us that the human being possesses something like a “body” that can be separated from the other part that constitutes it, the spirit or the psyche. However, at the beginning of Western thought, there...

Abstract: Aristotle’s Poetics, which provides the earliest Western theory of fictional narrative (muthos), has in turn become an object of fiction for contemporary novelists (Borges, Eco). But the story of the Poetics goes back earlier: Aristotle as poetician was chosen as the subject of a painting by Rembrandt, and since the Renaissance, his poetical theories have been embroidered into conflicting critical metanarratives about its place and effect in the history of aesthetics. Does such a proliferation of narratives simply make a case for skeptical relativism towards this “mythical object”? or can these narratives in turn become the object of a critical...